This 1,700 page (and still growing) picture book documents the 33-year restoration project on our property, its historical background, and the purposes and context in which it is maintained. That it is a "picture book" does NOT mean that it is a "children's book." Its highly graphical nature is for efficient and effective communication to people at a post-college-graduate level.
The following picture books are from the original CD e-book Shemitta: For the Land Is Mine. It will be viewable from that site as soon as the next revision is done. All are under 100 slides. These brief stories expose the already destructive and potentially catastrophic results of political control of land use, whether by corrupt or incompetent agecies or by popular whim as manipulated by mass media and government education. Together, these books suggest what will be necessary to mitigate those hazards and build a better world, both for humans and the planet for which we are responsible.
A dry landscape that shouldn't look like a desert but for weeds and vegetative mismanagement as compared to adjacent managed ground.
Another dry landscape that looks like a desert because of weeds and vegetative mismanagement as compared to adjacent managed ground.
This is managed ground, and how! Gosh, it's pretty. Don't you think it should be "protected," maybe as a National Park? Don't you dare.
The Warm Fire: "Silt" Writ Somewhat Large
Worried about silt from logging? Look what happens if you don't log at all.
And then there's what comes after the fire. This is about real choices with real consequences, and on a staggering scale.
Meadow Encroachment in Yosemite Valley
A discussion of the vegetative succession overcoming Cook's Meadow and how our perceptions are driving a process that is destroying the diversity of the meadow. European Americans so valued this place when they took it over from the Ahwaneechee. So why can't the Park Service fix it? Maybe it has something to do with the political pressures and lack of accountability inherent to socialized ownership?
In September, 2002, a lightning fire blew into the US Forest Service's Black's Mountain Experimental Forest, in Lassen County, CA. This site contained a mix of "experimental" managed and unmanaged conifer stands, each with specific pre-treatments. The results were so predictable that one wonders why such a study area is even necessary.
Fires threatening expensive residential structures are relatively common in California, but not as often here in the Santa Cruz Mountains as one might think. These are a strange mix of executive mansions and older, often dilapidated structures usually inhabited by a mix of Silicon Valley twenty-somethings, construction professionals, and long-time elderly residents. They share common problems and threats, but are all subject to the misconceptions from the popular ideal of Nature as best left unmanaged. This picture book assesses the interaction of that philosophy with two fires occurring very close to each other within only six years, thus providing a rare opportunity to witness a system in different stages of recovery, and the lessons obviously not being learned.
Most wildlife and insects are directly dependant upon post-disturbance native plants. Similar to fire, grazing is a form of disturbance that can be used to benefit native habitat threatened by a combination of exotic species and lack of successional disturbance. Unless great care is taken, disturb a habitat in the presence of weeds, and the natives lose. Grazing animals can be managed and even trained to target weeds successfully while reducing fuel accumulations to more manageable levels. If we are ever going to get control of exotics without need for massive use of herbicides on a continental scale, we will need to revive a dying culture of trained animal management professionals.
The people who expect and direct the many levels of government agencies to "protect the environment" ususally live in absolute alienation from it. The concentration of their dwellings (dubbed "Sustainable Development" per the UN Agenda 21) renders them subject to a range of catastrophic risks subsequent to even a small interruption of critical services (particularly water and electrical power). Their existence is far more fragile than most any of them could imagine. Yet they go on with life oblivious, destroying the nearby industries that maintain the very people who could help save their lives in an emergency.
This is about what happens when there is an urban emergency the way we do things now. This is why we urgently. need landscapes capable of supporting human survival. Disaster preparation is the kind of work that makes a great vacation, builds a family, and establishes deep and lasting new relationsips, binding a society together like nothing else short of war. This is what the Biblical Sabbath for the Land was originally meant to accomplish.
©2015 by Wildergarten Press
P.O. Box 98
Redwood Estates, CA 95044-0098
www.wildergarten.com